Exclusive Interview: Critical Role Stars Discuss The Legend of Vox Machina

 

 

For the unaware, Prime Video’s upcoming animated series, The Legend of Vox Machina, may seem like an interesting take on the fantastical world of Dungeons and Dragons. However, the new show is already a hit boasting millions of followers chomping at the bit for the release.

The Legend of Vox Machina is the adaptation of the live-recorded Dungeons and Dragons adventures of the viral Twitch series, Critical Role. The creator-owned web series established in 2015 offers hundreds of episodes and is currently in its third campaign. Millions of fans globally tune into the weekly adventures mastered by Matthew Mercer, his famous friends, and celebrity guests. A fact that made raising over USD 11 million for an original animated series impressive but understandable.

The Legend of Vox Machina is set to release on Friday, January 28, 2022, with three episodes. Each week, three new episodes will be released before wrapping up on February 18, 2022. Set to be an instant hit, we at Bubbleblabber had the opportunity to ask the stars of Critical Role a few questions before the big release. Dungeon master Matt Mercer, gnome cleric Ashley Johnson, and half-elf druid Marisha Ray sat down with us to share their excitement on the series.

 

Jesse Bereta: The origins of this new animated series has its own lore and deep history. For any newcomers, could you quickly, in your own words, explain how The Legend of Vox Machina came to be?

 

Matthew Mercer: To keep it concise, we were a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors that became friends through the industry. Just being nerds that began playing role-playing games at home together. And we fell in love with each other and became close friends through that process. It became a huge passion of ours. We began to stream it online when we had the opportunity, and it suddenly swelled into a massive thing that we didn’t think it would. We just played out our fantasy stories and rolled dice, and role-played these epic adventures. Now we are able to adapt over to an incredibly epic animated series that you get to watch.

 

JB: With Critical Role, there are hundreds of hours, hundreds of episodes, including large ongoing plots that span multiple years. How difficult was it to condense that down to 24 half-hour episodes? And what were some of the main focuses when coming into it?

 

Ashley Johnson: It was definitely tough. Especially when there were things that you felt like you had to let go of or were not as important to drive the story that we want to tell with this animation. But, overall, when we’re improving and role-playing, it’s hard to have a bad story decision. So, we already had such great source material to pull from. We really didn’t have to change much of the overarching story at all. It was just cutting out the fat and streamlining it. But also being very considerate to be sure that we left in – as we like to call them, the moments around the campfire. Little quiet moments that make people fall in love with these characters when they are watching the tabletop stream.

 

JB: How did you find a balance going into this show of pleasing the old fans, your big fan market, and catching a fresh audience with a new animated series?

 

MM: That was definitely a consideration and a challenge. I think a lot of it is hoping that if we stick to what we enjoy and what we’re passionate about, people will still connect with it. Being able to bring it to a more short-form animated format is a little more digestible for folks that may bounce off the idea of hundreds of hours of watching eight people at a table roll dice and talk at each other. So, bringing it to a cartoon already helps make it a little more digestible and approachable for a wider audience. But for us, we didn’t want to change too much. We didn’t want to make it too family-oriented because our original stories are definitely adults; they are just us telling the things we’re passionate about and excited about. We didn’t want to lean too heavily into making it more than it ever was. It was just trying to stay true to what we originally did with these characters and these stories. And do our best to creatively carry that over into the animation without much of a shift; that was our big focus.

 

JB: I was surprised when watching, at the mature themes and blood and gore. It is really adult-themed, and it separates it from other fantasy epics. How important was it to keep that adult rating? And what lead to that choice of not making it more family-friendly?

 

AJ: I think that’s just how we role-played the game at the table. I mean, we weren’t censoring ourselves at all. And we were collectively telling a story that we all enjoyed to tell. And a lot of that was not safe for kids. There is also an element to it that a lot of fantasy can be very serious. We all have this, bring a little bit of silliness to it and of fun, and not taking ourselves super seriously. It is just us having a good time with our friends. And some of that is going to be blood and gore.

 

Marisha Ray: So much of this is a love letter to the cartoons, the Saturday morning cartoons, the things that we grew up with as kids – we’re all kids of the 80s. So, that audience, we still love cartoons, but we’re grown up now. It’s an adult version of what we all fell in love with as kids.

 

MM: Yeah, I think it was less about us going, “let’s make this an adult cartoon”, and “let’s make this a cartoon that is authentic to the story we told.” And that story just happens to be adult, so let’s not change it.

 

This interview was edited for the purpose of clarity.

The Legend of Vox Machina premieres on Friday, January 28, 2022, on Prime Video.